Channing Tatum on How Kanye West Influenced Jupiter Ascending

When Channing Tatum’s latest movie, 22 Jump Street, opens, it’s clear what most people expect—and hope— from it: more of the charming, pumped-up idiocy of 21 Jump Street. But as for the Channing Tatum movie that was scheduled to swiftly follow it in July (but now postponed until February 2015), Jupiter Ascending, directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski, far less seems certain. During the conversations for GQ’s new cover story on Tatum, Chris Heath spoke to Tatum—and to his Jupiter Ascending co-star Mila Kunis—about what is (eventually) on its way, and how it came to be.

"From everything I’ve gathered," says Tatum, "it’s going to be a unique movie. You know, everybody complains ’it’s a remake of this movie, it’s a remake of that movie’. This is a purely original idea. Original thought. That’s what’s sort of great about the Wachowskis."

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In the movie Tatum plays a warrior who appears to be part-human and part-wolf (he has short, pointy ears) and is charged with protecting Mila Kunis’s character, the Jupiter of the title, as she discovers her destiny. It was a role he pursued. "They sat down with a lot of people," he says. "I think they had asked somebody who were the good actors in town that were very physical, and could do fighting and stunts and stuff, and my name was one of them so they sat down with me. And we just really got along. I love Lana and Andy."

Part of the film’s appeal to Tatum was its size: a huge action movie on a scale he had yet to experience. So part of that initial conversation with the Wachowskis came as no surprise. "They really wanted to know: Was I up for a challenge physically, like I’d never been challenged before?" he says. "You know what the answer was there." Tatum was less prepared for their other questions: "Have I ever been in love? Do I know what love is? What do I believe about love? That’s really what we talked about. We just like talked about life and stuff. It was an interesting way into their process, just talking about real experience and real relation to those emotions. So they know if they can really get what they need out of you, I guess." And reading the script, their interrogation made sense. While on a certain level Jupiter Ascending is a fantastical and complex multi-planetary story, Tatum says that in other ways it is quite simple: "It’s a big movie, and it’s about, essentially, love."

Making it was not easy, though. Tatum still seems to be reeling a bit from the experience. "I had no idea what I was going into with Jupiter, zero idea," he reflects. "I had no clue what it was going to mean to make a movie like that. And it almost killed me. I think we were behind the eight-ball from the very beginning. Those movies, I like to call them like pseudo-controlled avalanches."

Until he was deep within it, he had no idea just how new an experience it would prove to be. "I didn’t know how the Wachowskis worked," he says. "I didn’t know what it was to be in, like, a sci-fi movie, I didn’t know what it was to do wires. I didn’t know how many moving parts there are on a huge movie like that. You know, I’ve been a big movie before—Roland’s movie [Roland Emmerich’s White House Down] was big but it wasn’t as big as_ Jupiter_. I barely saw the Wachowskis because I was over on the stunt set stage, and they are basically in their director’s tent, and they’re just texting back and forth to the second unit director what they want me to be doing. There’s third unit, fourth unit, all these crazy things going on. I had no idea."

Whether close up or at a distance, the directors’ ways were clearly exacting. "You think that action movie directors aren’t artists, and they just ecute these big huge scenes of explosions and CG and fighting and whatnot. Lana and Andy are real artists. Every single one of the scenes, or even the moves that I was doing, or, like, the words that I was saying—it had to be an original thought from them. It’s a slow process sometimes. Like, there was a stunt that we worked on for, I want to say three months. We did about seven to eight different versions of this one stunt that I’m not sure even made it into the movie."

One further challenge for Tatum was the physical transformation required.

"I like looking different," he says. "I haven’t looked that different in a lot of my movies, so it was kind of refreshing. I have crazy ears and fangs and stuff, and, like, I’m painted like I’m half-albino."

"I thought the ears were adorable," says Mila Kunis.

"I just wanted to make sure that I didn’t look Teen Wolf, or something like that," says Tatum. "We played around with a bunch of different things, and ultimately that was sort of just the very simple version, where it’s not so distracting. All of it was definitely learning. Like you go, okay, I wanted ears but now how much do you use them? I have a sort of super power of scent—I can track a gene through the universe, basically, through my smell. How do you do that? What does that look like? You know, you don’t want to be like [Tatum mimes some very cartoonish nose-in-the-air sniffing]. You don’t want to be like a dog. So there’s, like, the wrong way. You’ve got to find it. So there’s a lot of giggles on set. How do you do it and not look like an idiot doing it? So I’m hoping I don’t look like an idiot. We’ll see."

He also had to wear a mouthpiece that changed the shape of his lower jaw. "Which made it kind of interesting," he says, "because I couldn’t close my mouth. I couldn’t close my mouth to talk and so that was a hurdle to get over."

"I’m sure it couldn’t have been comfortable," Kunis observes. "He had to learn how to speak and not have a lisp."

She confirms how demanding the whole process was. "It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and I know some of the hardest things that I think he’s probably ever done. Just the pure exhaustion on the physical level. I think, you know, knowing that we were both in the same boat together makes it easy for us, but you never really know how it’s gonna be five months in, and it was such a great relief to have somebody who had the same outlook."

As actors often do, Tatum likes to play particular music while filming particular roles. For the forthcoming Foxcatcher (in which Tatum also substantially changes the physical shape of his face, though this time for a much more earthbound real-life role of an Olympic wrestler alongside Steve Carell and Mark Ruffalo) for instance, it was Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds Of Silence. And for Jupiter Ascending he favored Kanye’s Late Registration. "It gets me amped up and excited, but like ’I feel good’, not like rageful." But this wasn’t the only music he would hear on the set.

It was during the filming of Jupiter Ascending that White House Down was released, and one surreal part of its promotion was the emergence of a song by his costar Jamie Foxx, initially sparked by Jimmy Kimmel Live: a song, "(I Wanna) Channing All Over Your Tatum", which mutated his name into some kind of otherwise indescribable sexual act.

Nonetheless, he eventually agreed to record his part in it at Foxx’s home studio, and to appear in the video. "I don’t know what to make of it," he says. "There’s nothing really to make of it other than I’m hoping it kind of came and went."

But it was during the filming of Jupiter Ascending that it came, and the stunt crew saw an opportunity. "It was super annoying," he says, "to hear everybody singing the thing all day."

That, at least, is how Tatum tells it—as an embarrassing joke that got out of hand and that he was too good-humored not to go along with but which now slightly haunts him. And that is how a sensible man probably should talk about a song like this. Though, for the record, Mila Kunis does remember it slightly differently.

"I don’t think he was haunted by it," she says. "I’m pretty sure he came up with a whole other verse for that song—it had to do with my first name and my last name. I think he loved it."

The one pressure that wasn’t apparent on the set of Jupiter Ascending, says Tatum, was a sense of how important this movie was for the Wachowskis’ career. From the outside, ever since the incredible triumph of the first Matrix movie their momentum has stuttered through the Matrix sequels, Speed Racer and, most recently, their monumental reimagining of the David Mitchell book Cloud Atlas, a delightfully strange and messy epic that failed to connect with a wide audience. Jupiter Ascending is something of a return to the heroic science fiction that made their name and as it approaches, the divergent expectations—that with it they will rediscover their golden touch, that they will prove for good that they have lost it—get louder.

"I mean, I go online," Tatum says. "I read what people say. But I didn’t really feel that from them. They weren’t making a movie out of that place. I think they are true-to-heart god-honest artists. I had a long conversation with Lana at dinner—this was when Cloud was coming out and she was just feeling beat up about Cloud. And I’m like, ’look I get it...it’s hard when you make something in your heart and the whole world maybe doesn’t feel it the same way as you do’. It’s hard. They are wildly unique people, and intelligent and deep people. They’re unicorns. Maybe they’re not going to be wildly understood. But I definitely think it hurt their hearts a lot that maybe Cloud wasn’t accepted in the way that they wanted it to be. I know that they’re super-proud of it. They poured their hearts out into it. But there was no panic on this movie of, ’God, this movie has got to be good’. Nothing."